A Chattanooga couple accused of child abuse and murder return to court today in a case that sheds new light on how computer problems within the Department of Children’s Services have affected the ability of caseworkers to protect children.

Four-year-old Ty’Reke Evans died Dec. 19, 2011, after suffering multiple blunt force injuries, including rib fractures, brain swelling, and bruises and welts that a physician said were consistent with being beaten by a belt. An autopsy also noted internal organ damage a week to 10 days old.

His then-3-year-old brother was admitted to the hospital on the same day Ty’Reke died with similar injuries. But the younger child survived.

Prosecutors believe both boys were victims of their mother, Patricia Brewer, 25, and her live-in boyfriend, Kenneth Coleman, 23, who each face two counts of aggravated child abuse and aggravated child neglect and one count of felony murder, records show. At their bond hearing, Chattanooga Judge David Bales said if the allegations were true, the boys had lived in a “house of horrors.”

In the weeks before the child’s death, at least three claims of child abuse were called into DCS by family and educators, including one report from staff at a preschool reporting bruises on Ty’Reke and saying the “situation is escalating.”

But in a mix-up that DCS staff later blamed on the agency’s computer system, supervisors assigned the first child abuse report on Nov. 11 to one caseworker while two more reports of child abuse — on Dec. 7 and again on Dec. 8 — were assigned to another caseworker.

“The case managers with the open case didn’t know each other had a case,” DCS records note, describing “technical challenges” with Tennessee Family and Child Tracking System, also called TFACTS, the department’s comprehensive data system.

Neither caseworker knew of the extent of the allegations involving the boys. One caseworker thought the family had only one child, not two. When the second caseworker got the case, she was unaware the family was already being investigated by DCS — a history that could have signaled the need for heightened scrutiny and interventions into the family.

“The TFACTS system, for some reason, did not make the connection when the reports came in,” read a note in DCS records obtained by The Tennessean. “With the volume of referrals that are assigned on a daily basis there were no opportunities to make the connection.”

The newspaper, along with a coalition of the state’s media organizations, filed suit to gain access to agency records on child deaths.

Some of the entries documenting DCS efforts to investigate the family were not entered into the computer system until five months after Ty’Reke’s death. DCS policy requires such entries be made within 30 days, according to spokesman Rob Johnson.

Johnson noted in this case that some of the later entries “reflect the fact that the our staff had just recently met with law enforcement and prosecutors, who were deciding then whether to proceed with criminal charges, months after our initial involvement. Closing out all the elements of the case has sometimes involved data-entry workarounds, and previous recordings were sometimes re-entered.”

Troubled system

The $27 million TFACTS system has been plagued by problems from its inception in August 2010, including failures to generate payments to foster parents and an inability to track child deaths. In 2012, legal advocates for children in DCS foster care told a federal judge that TFACTS problems were at a “crisis” stage, leaving the agency incapable of providing accurate data to determine whether the children were being properly protected. DCS has since invested nearly $4 million in system upgrades. By April of this year, Children’s Rights reported significant improvements.

Johnson noted the improvements and said that DCS investigations require multiple trips to visit families, who are often not forthcoming and entail “much more than relying on a computer system to make a digital connection between names, particularly when people aren’t certain how to spell those names when they contact us initially. Often we can make links through the computer system, but not always, even with the best technology available.”

“That said, we have reviewed this case in detail, and we are confident that crucial information discovered by our investigators was recorded in a timely fashion in the course of their work and that they were diligent about following up on the information they received.”

Brewer and Coleman are due to appear in a Hamilton County courtroom today to hear whether their cases will be tried together or separately.

The boys’ biological father was separated from Brewer, but remained in his sons’ lives and had reported concerns about Coleman’s temper, DCS records noted. He remains “saddened” about what happened and is seeking custody of his surviving son, said his Chattanooga-based attorney, Tabitha Finch. Finch said that after hearing testimony during the custody case about DCS involvement she believes computers alone are not to blame.

“As his attorney, I am very disappointed by how this case has been handled by DCS,” said Finch. “People look to DCS for protection for children. If policies had been adhered to, this situation may have ended differently.”

An attorney for Patricia Brewer called her a “caring and loving mother” who had no role in harming her children. Tiffany Campbell, the Chattanooga lawyer who represents Brewer in the custody case, believes it was a fatal error that the first investigation in November wasn’t logged into the system until after Ty’Reke's death in December.

“It is my belief that if the child protective services investigator had timely entered her activity of her investigation into TFACTS that there would have been a different outcome," she said.